afraid to cross the chasm and turned back thus not acquiring the curing power. [121] Indeed, among some groups like the Caddo, doctoring is expressly absent. [122] In Mescalero, too, “prophecy and advice were no small part of the performance. It was rarely that his power did not vouchsafe the shaman some reassuring information concerning the longevity of his patient, the number of grandchildren with which he would be blessed, and the future state of his fortunes.” They also controlled the weather thus, found lost objects, located the enemy, etc., but doctoring was the main feature of Mescalero peyote meetings. [123] Shonle (_Peyote: Giver of Visions_, 57) notes that peyote was latterly a reservation phenomenon, when tribal enmities were gone. The Ghost Dance had been anti-White; peyotism was a compromise, and the friendly intertribal contacts growing out of the Ghost Dance could now be exploited. [124] Cf. Tamaulipecan rites and the black-drink ball-game of the Southeast. (The black drink was as nearby as the Karankawa.) The Southwest-Southeast connections are more than superficial; Beals (_Comparative Ethnology_, 142) believes there is a probable connection of Southwest-Mexican alcoholic drinks with the Southeastern black drink. [125] Curiously the cigarette of the region farther west is universal in the intrusive Plains peyote rite, while at Mescalero the stone elbow pipe is passed around in the calumet fashion of the Plains in one leader’s ceremony. [126] Is this a culture-environmental problem?—for the same substance which was spectacularly aphrodisiac in Lame Deer, Montana, was stubbornly anaphrodisiac in Philadelphia. Unfortunately for the accusing school of thought, Bennett and Zingg’s trait-distribution tables indicate a negative association of sexual promiscuity and the ritual use of peyote in Mexico. [127] Opler says that “in no other Mescalero ceremony is a mound of earth in the shape of a crescent found. On the other hand, crude earth tracings did grace a Mescalero rite occasionally, and the moon was much in evidence in ritual song and design. The staff of the peyote shaman seems an innovation at first thought; yet it has a counterpart in the ‘old age stick’ held by the singer in the girl’s puberty rite.” The gourd in Mescalero has exclusively peyote associations. On the whole, the standard Plains ceremony appears to have taken shape among the Lipan-Mescalero. But Curtis (_North American Indian_ 19:199-200) says that the White Mountain Apache were the first United States users and that “the ritual [in the United States] is obviously copied from the Wichita ceremonial form.” COMPARATIVE STUDY OF PLAINS PEYOTISM